Antibiotics

Wegmans to start offering free antibiotics Wegmans Food Markets Inc. said it will begin offering free antibiotics during cough and cold season as it tries to compete for customers in a weak economy. The Rochester, N.Y.-based grocery chain with 72 stores said shoppers with one of its club cards will not be charged for generic oral antibiotic prescriptions through March 31. The program covers up to a 14-day supply of the generic oral antibiotics, including amoxicillin and cephalexin, among others.

Faced with mounting evidence that the routine use of antibiotics in livestock may diminish the drugs' power to cure infections in people, the Food and Drug Administration has begun a major revision of its guidelines for approving new antibiotics for animals and for monitoring the effects of old ones.The goal of the revision is to minimize the emergence of bacterial strains that are resistant to antibiotics. Such resistance makes them difficult or impossible to kill.Drug-resistant infections, some fatal, have been increasing in people in the United States, and many scientists attribute the problem to the misuse of antibiotics in people and animals.

I THOUGHT WE HAD settled this long ago. This creationism vs. evolution argument. I thought evolution, with dump trucks full of evidence on its side, had declared victory and left the creationists to rant among themselves and pull their children out of public schools.Apparently not.Having failed (thanks to the Supreme Court) to shoe-horn their theory into schools under some kind of misguided fairness doctrine, creationists have changed their tactics. They now aim to diminish the teaching of evolution, and in Kansas they have succeeded.

A 40-year-old accountant, in treatment for leukemia at the University of Maryland Medical Center, gets infected with a tenacious bacteria that hangs on for two years despite large doses of antibiotic. Finally, in the middle of chemotherapy, his infection flares up again. He goes into septic shock and dies.A 2-year-old Randallstown girl catches a pneumococcus infection that, maddeningly, defies the first drugs used to treat it. It blooms into a life-threatening illness.Physicians discover that at least three bone-marrow transplant patients at Johns Hopkins Hospital harbor a weird type of the enterococcus bacteria.

Health authorities and pediatricians have joined forces to curb the overuse of antibiotics, a practice that has promoted dangerous bacteria resistant to penicillin and other common "wonder drugs."In announcing a pilot program yesterday, Maryland Health Secretary Martin P. Wasserman said he was particularly concerned about the spread of drug-resistant pneumococcal bacteria, organisms that can cause meningitis, blood infections and pneumonia."The continued spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria will have a devastating impact on our ability to fight common infections," Wasserman said at a news briefing yesterday.

Many physicians on Maryland's Eastern Shore are needlessly prescribing antibiotics and ordering blood tests for patients who have been bitten by ticks but have no symptoms of Lyme disease, according to a study published today.Researchers warned that the overuse of antibiotics, besides driving up health care costs, could spur the growth of new bacterial strains that resist standard drugs. Antibiotics are not 00 warranted unless patients have developed symptoms characteristic of Lyme disease, they said.

Call them stealth bacteria.For years, chronic ear infections have presented a puzzle. Even when children exhibited all the symptoms of infection, doctors often were unable to grow bacteria from their middle-ear fluids. Now, though, researchers in Pittsburgh have found genetic evidence of active bacteria in the ears of such children.They suspect that the bacteria have learned to band together in a cooperative community called a biofilm, a sort of germ city that not only protects them from antibiotics but actually makes them much harder to detect than free-floating bugs.

Towson University's health center administered antibiotics to nearly 250 students yesterday as preventive medicine against bacterial meningitis, after a freshman was diagnosed with the disease on Thursday.The student, a member of the Kappa Delta sorority who lives on the third floor of Scarborough Hall dormitory, was hospitalized after she suffered headaches, stiffness and a sore throat, said school officials, who declined to identify the student or release her condition.Dr. Jane L. Halpern, director of the student health center, said none of the students who came to the university's Dowell Health Center showed symptoms of the disease.

Antibacterial soap?Isn't that what soap is supposed to do anyway, kill germs? That's what your mother always said. Do we really need antibacterial soaps (and household cleaners and sponges) the way all the marketers tell us?Yes and no, area experts say.Yes, if you have a recurrent skin infection or work in a neonatal intensive care unit or change the iguana's cage.But do we really need it every day?"At home, it doesn't make that much difference," says Robert J. Ancona, a pediatrician in private practice in the Village of Cross Keys who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases.

Chicken Out is checkin' in.The Chicken Out Rotisserie restaurant chain, based in Rockville, received approval this week from Howard County land-use planners to build two restaurants in Columbia.One is at the Columbia Crossing shopping center off Route 175; the other is in the new River Hill Village Center being built off Route 108.Lee Hindin, president of Chicken Out, expects both to open shortly before the end of the year.Chicken Out chickens are organically raised, using no steroids, hormones or antibiotics, Hindin said.

Most people come to a hospital expecting to get better. But many don't realize that on average, one in 20 patients admitted to a hospital in the United States will contract an infection during his or her stay. These infections cause a staggering 99,000 deaths per year. And a growing proportion of these infections no longer respond to a wide range of antibiotics. Doctors must turn to more costly antibiotics or ones with more side effects - if they can cure the infection at all. A 2005 report showed that hospitals could charge the cost of health care-associated infections to third-party payers such as Medicare and Medicaid.

Safeway stores offering some antibiotics free Safeway Inc. yesterday became the latest area grocer to offer some prescription antibiotics for free. The program, which covers up to a 14-day supply of nine generic antibiotics, is in affect until March 31. Safeway is among grocers around the country offering the antibiotics program in an attempt to lure customers. Giant Food and Wegmans Food Markets Inc. also offer free antibiotics. Andrea K. Walker 10 tech companies get $750,000 from TEDCO The Maryland Technology Development Corp.

Wegmans to start offering free antibiotics Wegmans Food Markets Inc. said it will begin offering free antibiotics during cough and cold season as it tries to compete for customers in a weak economy. The Rochester, N.Y.-based grocery chain with 72 stores said shoppers with one of its club cards will not be charged for generic oral antibiotic prescriptions through March 31. The program covers up to a 14-day supply of the generic oral antibiotics, including amoxicillin and cephalexin, among others.

Giant Food to offer free generic antibiotics Giant Food said yesterday that it will offer free generic antibiotics in nine categories from Jan. 2 to March 21 to anyone who has a prescription. It joins groceries and drugstores around the country that have offered similar programs to attract shoppers. The drug program will cover 36 antibiotics that are used to treat common illnesses during the cold and flu season. Antibiotics in the program include amoxicillin, ampicillin, bacitracin ophthalmic ointment, cephalexin capsules, ciprofloxacin, erythromycin and penicillin.

The miracle drugs of the 20th century are under threat. Doctors are frustrated by rising numbers of illnesses resistant to their arsenal of antibiotics. When these medicines don't work, patients suffer or even die, and our nation's health tab ratchets upward. Drugs such as penicillin and tetracycline, used routinely to treat respiratory disease and heart infections in humans, are also fed routinely to farm animals - not to treat diagnosed disease but to promote growth and to compensate for the overcrowded, stressful, unsanitary conditions on factory farms.

Tyson Foods Inc. has settled a multimillion-dollar lawsuit filed by two competitors, including Maryland's Perdue Farms, alleging that the Arkansas company used deceptive marketing to lie about its antibiotics use in poultry. But now the company faces lawsuits from consumers. Four cases claiming to represent thousands of people have been filed this month in federal courts across the country, including two in Baltimore since Friday. Each seeks class action status, and each alleges that Tyson violated state consumer protection acts.

Higher education level might mean lower BMI When it comes to a healthy body weight, education matters. Highly educated men and women in the U.S. have a lower average body mass index than their less-educated counterparts, according to a new comparison of international data. Conversely, highly educated men and women in poor countries where malnutrition is prevalent tend to have a higher BMI than less-educated people. In short, education appears to confer a healthy buffer against obesity, or malnutrition, depending on the country of origin.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has ordered Tyson Foods Inc. to stop using a packaging label claiming that its chickens are raised without antibiotics that affect drug resistance in humans, saying the Arkansas company medicates its poultry with gentamicin, which is used to treat bacterial infections in people. The Food Safety and Inspection Service division within the USDA found that Tyson routinely uses gentamicin to "prevent illness and death in chicks," Richard Raymond, the under secretary for food safety, said in a statement yesterday.

Thousands of seniors graduating from Maryland colleges this spring will be guaranteed the right to stay on their parents' health insurance until they turn 25, thanks to a law that went into effect this year. In the past, many lost coverage when they finished their studies, making the group - especially those who attend graduate school - among the most likely in the country to lack insurance, according to studies of the issue. "I know this will help a lot of students, including me, especially considering how expensive health insurance has become," said Jenny Haley, 21, a political science and economics major from Towson University who will begin graduate work at the Johns Hopkins University in the fall.

A U.S. Court of Appeals has denied an emergency request by Tyson Foods to stay a federal judge's decision about its advertising, leaving the Arkansas company with two weeks to pull marketing material from more than 8,000 stores claiming that its chickens are raised free of certain drugs. "We're disappointed the motion for a stay has been denied and are evaluating our legal options," Tyson Foods Inc. spokesman Gary Mickelson said in a statement yesterday. "We continue to believe we have acted responsibly in the way we have labeled and marketed our products and intend to stand our ground."